Of much use in understanding the course of late-19th-century American history, a time of turmoil that resembles our own in...
A closely argued account of how various constituencies—women, farmers, African Americans, workers—vied for a place at the table in the reunited republic.
As Bancroft Prize–winning historian Postel (San Francisco State Univ.; The Populist Vision, 2007) recounts, the Civil War brought newfound demands for equality in unexpected ways. At the beginning of the narrative, the author chronicles how logisticians responsible for burying the Union dead at Gettysburg struggled to devise a way to represent each contributing state equally, “a challenge given that more bodies came from some states than from others and given the sloping and uneven terrain of the grounds.” Other interest groups would find the terrain even rougher. The Grange movement, for instance, sought to represent the interests of small farmers in a time of federal consolidation and the growth of great railroad and manufacturing corporations. The press of the agrarians for a Cabinet-level secretary of agriculture led to some uncomfortable accommodations, including making common cause with Southern farmers opposed to Reconstruction. As a result, African Americans were often excluded, though sometimes not, in influential visions of the postwar nation. The Grangers and radical labor movement alike saw their enemy as the “monopolists,” a category that “included bankers, lawyers, grain elevator and cotton gin operators, insurance agents, grain and cotton purchasers, farm machinery dealers, and local merchants.” The women’s temperance movement took similar views: The enemy was not just alcohol, but also inequality, which yielded a movement to outlaw booze and, as well, grant women the right to vote, to say nothing of demanding equal pay for equal work. Postel has a keen eye for unlikely juxtapositions. For instance, as he writes, the leader of the hard-charging Knights of Labor became not just a close ally and protector of the radical activist Mother Jones, but also, and simultaneously, “an official in the federal bureaucracy enforcing the Chinese exclusion laws and other restrictive policies.”
Of much use in understanding the course of late-19th-century American history, a time of turmoil that resembles our own in many respects.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8090-7963-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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